Explore the County Series Maps

Surveyed 1791-1874, published 1805-1874. Scale is 1:10,000.

The origins of the six-inch to the mile maps (1:10,560) date back to
1824 when this scale was adopted for a survey of Ireland. By 1840 it had
been decided to extend the project to Great Britain. To conduct a
survey at such a scale, every corner of the country, including
private property, would need to be visited. The following year, the
Survey Act was passed which gave surveyors the right to enter any land
for the purposes of carrying out their duties. It also specified the
types of boundaries that the new maps were to display (down to
parish level).

A sample of the 1:10,000 scale County Series Map.

Work began in Lancashire and Yorkshire in 1841 and in Scotland in
1843 with the first sheet appearing in 1846. It was not until 1890 that
maps covering the whole country had been published, the first generation
of what later became known as the County Series.

By that time revisions to the earlier sheets were already underway,
a rolling process that continued until the last County Series sheets
were superseded by the 1:10,000 National Grid Edition in the 1980s.
Each sheet appeared in up to six editions, displaying various
evolutions of detail, format and reproduction technology. For over a
century, the Ordnance Survey’s County Series maps have revealed the
changing face of Britain in compelling and painstaking detail and
now provide immaculate records for 21st-century researchers and
historians.

The County Series maps most areas
of England and Wales. This involves combining more than one original
sheet to give an appropriate area of coverage. In the process, the
maps have been digitally enhanced and enlarged slightly to 1:10,000
to bring them into line with more recent maps at this metric scale.